There is a theory we hear a lot these days: AI will make many more people entrepreneurs.
I hope that is true. As a venture investor, I obviously want more people to start companies. More importantly, I think many more people can start companies now. The tools are better, the cost of building is lower, and a single person with good taste, domain knowledge, and persistence can do things today that would have required a small team only a few years ago.
But I am skeptical of the simple version of the argument. AI may make it easier to build a prototype, write code, research a market, run marketing campaigns, or learn useful skills quickly. These are all substantial changes. They lower the cost of starting.
They do not lower the cost of enduring.
Entrepreneurship is not mainly hard because building prototypes is hard. It is hard because it comes with tons of uncertainty. You do not know whether customers care, if the market is real, whether you are too early or too late, or if you are simply wrong. AI can help you move faster, but it cannot tell you with certainty if you’re going into the right direction.
AI is eroding traditional career arcs
For most of recent history, ambitious people were not really choosing careers in isolation. They were choosing arcs. A good career was not just a good job, it was a story about the future. You joined a bank, a consulting firm, a law firm, or a large technology company. You knew roughly what the next ten, twenty, thirty years could look like. You knew what counted as progress and it took to get promoted. You knew what your parents could tell their friends.
At the University of St.Gallen (HSG), where I studied, this kind of career logic is very visible. Most of the smartest students want a path with a clear ladder: consulting, banking, corporate roles, professional services. These are not unambitious choices. Quite the opposite. They are highly competitive paths chosen by highly capable people. But they are also legible. They come with a map. Entrepreneurship has become much more important in recent years, but it’s still the choice of a minority.
MIT, my other alma mater, has a different culture. It is more technical, more experimental, more comfortable with building things. But even at MIT, most graduates do not become founders. Many go into engineering roles, graduate school, research, or large technology companies. Even among very talented people, the desire for a clear arc is strong, often stronger than the desire for independence.
For a long time, that desire was rational. A good career was predictable. You could work hard in your twenties, specialize in your thirties, then manage people and reasonably expect that the institution around you would still understand your value until retirement.
AI is now making that deal less obvious, far less certain.
It is not only that certain tasks will be automated. The deeper issue is that specialization cycles are getting shorter. The thing that made you valuable five years ago may become ordinary very quickly. The skill that looked like a durable foundation may turn into a plugin in an agent platform.
This is disorienting for young people, but it may be even more disorienting for people in their thirties and forties. A twenty-three-year-old can say: maybe I should learn a different stack, join a different kind of company, take more risk. That is hard, but it is an advantage of being young. It is harder when you are thirty-nine, have spent fifteen years becoming excellent at something, have a mortgage, a family, a professional identity, and suddenly realize that the career arc you chose is being disrupted while you are already halfway through it.
This is why the “everyone will become an entrepreneur” story is both attractive and misleading. It is attractive because it seemingly offers a way out. If institutions are less reliable, build your own thing. If ladders are moving, stop climbing and start creating. If AI gives everyone leverage, maybe the best move is to bet on yourself.
There is truth in that. But there is also a romanticism that is, frankly, a bit naive.
It’s cool to be a founder. Is that a good thing?
Entrepreneurship has become very high status. For many young people, “founder” is now one of the most desirable identities. In some circles, it has replaced the banker, consultant, or big tech engineer as the default symbol of ambition. That is a remarkable and positive change.
When I co-founded my first company in 1995, entrepreneurship in Europe was not glamorous. It was exotic, even strange. There was almost no infrastructure, very few role models, and barely any capital. The safe path was much easier to explain. Why would you start a company if you could easily get a job at UBS or McKinsey?
Nowadays, starting a company is culturally legible. There is an entire ecosystem built around the idea that starting a company is an admirable thing to do. I am glad this changed. But the psychological reality of entrepreneurship has not changed nearly as much as the social status around it.
Today’s mature ecosystem suggests that there is a predictable arc to entrepreneurship, almost like a career in consulting. You “ideate”, get into an incubator program, raise some angel money, get first customers, raise a seed round and then series A, B, C, D, until a glamorous exit.
But the daily reality of a founder is not a pitch competition or podcast interview. It is confusing customer conversations, difficult product decisions, hiring mistakes, cash constraints, and long periods where nobody tells you how to continue, except yourself.
Some people thrive in that environment. Others do not. Both are valid preferences.
Entrepreneurial thinking will be crucial everywhere
This is why I think we need to separate two ideas that are often thrown together: becoming a founder and becoming more entrepreneurial.
AI will not make everyone a founder, and it should not. Many people do not want that life. Many people would be unhappy in it. Most people are excellent inside organizations and would create far more value there than by forcing themselves into a startup because the current culture says founders are cool.
But AI may require many more people to become entrepreneurial. That is different.
“Entrepreneurial” does not mean quitting your job to announce a stealth startup. It means developing agency and independent thinking. It means becoming less dependent on someone else giving you permission and defining your next step. It means learning how to identify problems, build solutions, talk to customers, create value.
That can happen inside a company. Or it can happen inside a university, in a side project, an independent consulting business. The distinction is important because many people hear “be entrepreneurial” and think “take existential risk.” But the most useful entrepreneurial behavior often starts with small, reversible risks.
AI allows you to take more risks, in any context
The question is not whether AI makes entrepreneurship easier. It obviously does. The better question is what kind of safety is still available. The old safety came from institutions: the name on your CV, the credential, the promotion path, and the assumption that a system would continue to reward you if you performed well. That form of safety is not disappearing, but it is becoming far less stable.
The new safety may come from something more portable: judgment, adaptability, reputation, customer understanding, and the ability to create value directly with small teams and powerful tools. What are you learning that is effective inside and outside your current institution? What judgment are you building? What visible proof of value are you creating?
AI lowers the cost of small experiments dramatically and allows more people to create something from scratch, inside a company or outside. The only bottleneck will be agency.
I do not think the future of careers is that everyone becomes a founder. The future is that more people will need to behave a little more like entrepreneurs, even when they are not founders. They will need to create solutions independently, keep learning (continuously and rapidly) after their formal training, build visible proof instead of relying only on institutional credentials. And they have to become more comfortable with uncertainty, not because uncertainty is fun, but because certainty is becoming rarer.
When I started a company in 1995, the strange thing was choosing entrepreneurship at all. Today, the strange thing may be believing that any institution can protect you from change. The safest career might be the one that helps you deal with uncertainty, and that’s what entrepreneurial thinking enables you to do.
